SECTION 2: Digital Resources in Performance Studies 2.1: How to design, build and maintain a database-powered web site Barry Russell
Editor, WWW Virtual Library for Theatre
(http://vl-theatre.com) 1. Doing it ourselves The first time I searched the web for "Racine" all I got was a list of pumpkin-growers in Racine County, Wisconsin. It's easy to be disappointed. We may miss what we're looking for entirely, even though it's out there. We may retrieve a fair number of relevant items, but find them buried in a mass of irrelevant material. How can we improve the situation? The short answer is that we could search among resources that have already been filtered by someone who knows the subject area - we could use a subject-specific gateway, a portal. The more precisely focused the portal, the better will be the returns we get from it. PADS, the Performing Arts Data Service, is building such a portal (http://www.pads.ahds.ac.uk/). When the British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, first thought about this problem a decade ago, he came up with the idea of the WWW Virtual Library (http://www.vlib.org). The plan was to create a master-catalogue of good resources, organised on a loose hierarchical tree structure, where each part of the tree was maintained by a volunteer. If you were interested in the theatre, for example, you'd start at the humanities, go to arts, then performing arts, then theatre. In an ideal world, he'd have come up with a systematic classification system, something like the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress system. But back in those early days, nobody really expected the growth that actually happened, and the first volunteer maintainers were largely left to their own devices. What we have now is an Internet whose growth is being driven by a wide variety of factors, and an increasingly overwhelming amount of material which it is difficult to find one's way around without the use of specialised gateways. The kind of material and organisation we are going to need in the future is beginning to emerge, but in a piecemeal, fragmented fashion. We can intervene as individuals to try to change this. By diverting some of the energies we have traditionally spent creating scholarly resources on paper into creating resources online, we could help to shape the working environment of the next generation. If the portal we want doesn't exist, we can create it. This paper offers some guidelines on how you might get started. The key point is to think of the task of creating web sites, not in terms of web technology alone, but as a combination between the web and a second technology: the database. 1.1 A powerful combination When you link a database engine to a web server you get a powerful combination that can deliver many kinds of scholarly project. This is the combination behind the World Wide Web Virtual Library for Theatre (http://vl-theatre.com), which now attracts over a million hits a year and grows under its own impetus with very little maintenance. Similar techniques drive the European Internet Resource Guide at Oxford Brookes University (http://solinux.brookes.ac.uk/rg/top.php3). They also provide the chronologies of French theatre and the bibliography of theatre scholarship that underpin the hypertext study of Parisian fairground theatre (http://foires.net). They lie at the heart of a major new international project called CESAR, a comprehensive survey of plays, performers, theatre spaces and publications in France during the 17th and 18th centuries that will be available online soon. Page 1 of 3 Top of Page
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